dcbevins

The bezier tool is your friend. Autotrace fails enough, that by the time you get the bitmap dark enough, change the autotrace settings, rinse and repeat until it is close, you could have just manually redrawn the thing. If you are no good with bezier tool, now is a great chance to gain proficiency. It will serve well into the future. After 20 minutes or so, it's as easy as tracing a picture with crayons. Here I took about five minutes and got this start. crown.svgcrown.svg

My daughter cut out some cardboard, added some suspenders, and I cut vinyl waves, flowers, windshield, tire rack and "Mystery Machine" on it and she went as the Scobbie Doo Mystery Machine.

Note that the trial of sign cut pro may limit the cutting size. Test with a very small design, (under 4"x4".) Most versions of sign cut pro have a plug in that installs into CorelDraw, that gives an option to send to SignCut. I don't think they have one for CorelDraw 2017 yet. As to the svg, make sure it is just an svg with all vector, no raster components or bitmap. You probably can't have filter effects either as these are raster, (like drop shadows or other special effects.) It has to be all paths. Post a link to one of the failing svg's here and we can look at it for difficulties.

I know of no cutting software from a tablet. Most cutters require a serial or usb port, which can be lacking on some tablets. The design software you get for tablets can be vector, but is going to be more primitive. I'm like Dakotagrafx, I like big screens. I use two 42" hdtv's as monitors. One is in front of me, and the other is to the right in portrait mode hanging on the wall. If you need a tablet for portable and school, get one, but budget a cheap desktop to stay with the cutter, drive the cutter and be more or less permanent. A Win PC good enough to drive the cutter can be cheap. A dirt cheap one, used maybe, say 100 bucks or less, would be enough. Win 7 is still good enough. If you can find a vector design tool for the tablet, then you can design on the go and cut from the shop. The vector app will have to spit out a format the cutting software can deal with.

Something sounds seriously foo barred. Maybe you have the wrong type of vinyl? It has to be HTV. I don't understand this folding your talking about. A weeded HTV item sits right on the shirt, letting me move it around. Maybe if I left it on the press with the press on for a day or two something bad might happen, but I've never seen that. This makes me think you have something other than Heat Transfer Vinyl. Don't forget to mirror image.

If the cutter is one Inkscape can recognize, there is no driver involved. It is direct communications, with no driver in the middle. Inkscape can send generic HPGL commands, DMPL commands, and KNK commands only through a com port. You don't install it as a printer. The most common problem with missing drivers for cutters is the USB driver so the device is recognized as a USB device which is often the ftdi driver., (http://www.ftdichip.com/FTDrivers.htm .)A cutter is rarely installed as a printer. When it is, the company making the cutters has created a mini cutting software in the psudeo print driver. Here is a screen shot from Inkscapes Plot Extension.

I think the laser are more colorfast with a softer hand. But there are lots of factors, the type of ink and toner, the type of paper. Makes apples to apples comparison hard.

If that laser did tabloid and printed white it would be great. Yes I want my cake and want to eat it too.

The little bubbles might settle down after they air overnight. The big bubbles one can poke a hole in to let the air escape. Squeegee the hell out of it. Xpaperman says to go from the middle out. This is while squeegeeing the transfer tape. I've never done coroplast wet, so not sure there. Pull up the transfer tape on the same plane as the coroplast, not straight up, ↔ not ↑.

Everybody remember that time, once upon a time, when you got that idea, to start making signs or shirts or graphics of some sort? Then you bought a bunch of the wrong equipment, spend months reading and researching. Failed. Slow dawning of being over your head. Finally, you got into an established shop and dried some of the wet behind your ears? Ahh nostalgia.....

If you already have a vinyl cutter, then a heat press and HTV would do shirts, with all the limitations and benefits. HTV is normally not a printed material. Maybe you are thinking of printed vinyl transfers. A printer that can do car wraps is likely a eco-solvent print cut combo. You can use one of those for shirts, with a heat press. There are transfers these eco-solvent printers can make and applied with a heat press. However, HTV and printed transfers are not idea for large production runs. It's really hard to say do 200 shirts this way. Ten yes, but large quantities are hard. Screen printing is the solution for quantity. Doing car wraps is far more profitable. However, its takes a great deal more experience than one might imagine. Likely you would have to go to a 3-7 day training program that might cost a few thousand to get started. It generally also requires a garage or a car bay.

I know in some apps, when you weld, (whatever it is called,) sometimes its not enough, you might also before you weld, reverse the path direction or change the winding rule. But often you don't.

That effect just seems to be a gradient. Print to go on what? If you mean on something for outdoors and is contour cut then you probably want an eco-solvent printer and a cutter, or a print/cut combo. Five hundred bucks won't get you there, Multiply by 18. A small eco-solvent print/cut combo: https://www.rolanddga.com/products/printers/versastudio-bn-20-t-shirt-printing-press

The heat re-sublimates the dye sometimes on polyester shirts, allowing it to migrate. "Sometimes," you can limit this by dividing the pressing time in half. Press half the time, let cool, press the other half. This somewhat prevents the dye in the shirt from hitting temperatures to migrate. Here is what Stahls says about it, and their product recommendations, (which I have yet to try but have intended to.) https://www.stahlstv.com/tip-tuesday-overcoming-dye-migration

Not being familiar with Cutting Master whatsoever, I looked it up a bit. I probably have misinformed you. Cutting Master doesn't appear to be stand alone cutting software, but only a plug in for Illustrator or CorelDraw. Thus you probably can't cut directly from it. You need stand alone cutting software.

Photo's to cut files means raster to vector. Maybe you are already up to speed here, but if not, that is your first concept to master, raster vs vector. You will likely be relying on Illustrator as opposed to Photoshop, as it is Adobe's go to vector software. As to compatibility, Signcut pro has a trial, you can test to see if it works. Many people here swear by VinylMaster. The Flexi family of software has a great range of compatibility, but some don't like the pricing.

All the cutting software I have ever seen can open a file directly. This is the normal mode of operation. Many don't even require Illustrator or another design program for desgin. It might not open a AI file directly, but if you save in it's native format it would be no problem. Though, it may open ai as well.

When I was fiddling with the beta, the only feature that jumped out at me was nesting. It was a bit convoluted to get it to nest, but it was there. The design features might be nice, but I use other design software. What I want is just something that cuts and cuts well.

Glad it wasn't me on the crane.

I would guess its the ink. Sometimes ink color shifts when pressed. You have to check the color calibration to the pressed item and not the printed item. Often it's a shift in the yellows. If its blacks tinged green, it might be some clogging issue. Some go to inks like Cobra ink trying to avoid the color shift but I haven't tried them. Sometimes, if you know which direction the color shift is going, you can compensate the colors in your image or even use a different ICC profile. What ink are you using?

Hey Guys, What brand of Tshirts might you people know that are longer in the torso that others?

Thanks. Ordered five of them.

I see your using Inkscape .48.5. That version used an internal dpi of 90 internally. It might be the cause of the size discrepancy when you paste as many other programs expect 96 dpi. If this is happening i think its like a 1.06666666667 percentage difference, or something like that. I'm not sure why your getting blank text when importing. Inkscape I think creates all text inside a <tspan> object that is wrapped by a <text> object. Looking at the "arial" block of text I see: <text xml:space="preserve" style="font-size:72px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Segoe Script;-inkscape-font-specification:Segoe Script" and sodipodi:linespacing="125%"><tspan sodipodi:role="line" id="tspan3905" x="82.85714" y="135.21933" style="-inkscape-font-specification:Arial;font-family:Arial;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-variant:normal">arial</tspan> One says Segoe Script and the other Arial. Maybe this is confusing VM. You could try saving a copy of the file as Plain SVG and see if it helps. However I think its time to upgrade to .92 and try. Lots of bug fixes and new features in .92. .48 is a bit old. The latest version of Inkscape switches to using 96 dpi internally, as is the CSS standard. This too might fix your size pasting issue. One thing to be cautions of, all Inkscape SVG files made in older versions will give a warning when opened with the newer version, due to the 90 vs 96 dpi issue. It gives you options to reset the viewbox, scale or ignore, while making a backup copy in the same directory. Scale is usually the one you want. But you should double check all sizes if you do this. If you have an IRC client, point it to irc://irc.freenode.org/#inkscape. This is the official Inkscape chat room. Somebody there might know. If you don't have a client, on the Inkscape web page is a web client, but it requires creating an account. https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/ You could also convert all the text to paths. It looses text edibility, but is more or less guaranteed to work.

Anybody tried CorelDraw 2017 yet. I am not sure how I feel about them going to what seems a yearly cycle vs the two year cycle they had been on. I guess they want upgrade revenue. It makes the subscription model more tenable if you are trying to stay current. Most of the changes, though not all seem geared to people using some form or stylus for hand drawing. They hype calls it an AI that learns your drawing style. I am %99 mouse and keyboard. I have a graphics tablet, but am all thumbs with it. So I don't know if these improvements hit home for me. Also the redraw rates for some operations are said to be improved. Some improvements to node operation and visibility are mentioned, and some changes to dealing with color. I guess I'll download it soon. I was wondering what you guys thought.

Triple layer blu-ray can do 100gb each disc. Still a pain when dealing with TB of stuff and not all that cheap. As to ransomware, its good to have something not connected to the computer. I keep my main 4tb backup drive offline until I use it. This would defeat your need to have everything always backing up and connected. If its connected ransomware can get to it. Online backup works here, to counter ransomware, but has a cost. I do things manually trying to avoid those costs. Sucks if I don't stick to a schedule. I though, don't yet have a bluray. I want one, but super critical stuff I still send to dvd. This is usually documents and created artwork but not collected clipart.